Meltdown and Spectre Mitigation

By kris

24-01-2018

In the beginning of this month vulnerabilities in the modern CPU’s were acknowledged. These vulnerabilities are named Meltdown and Spectre and together they basically enable attackers to reveal content of systems and application memory when managed the right way.

Unfortunately Meltdown and Spectre tend to affect a great number of processors like desktop computers, servers and virtual machines operating in the cloud environment. Most CPU’s are designed with the processor optimizations that are used by these vulnerabilities so most processors are defenseless until they targeted get patched.

Clay values safety and security highly, this is why Our DevOps engineer Niels immediately came to the rescue and installed patches on an operating system level as soon as they were made available by the vendors to prevent Meltdown. Spectre on the other hand was more difficult to deal with: Spectre holds a whole group of vulnerabilities. By changing the CPU design it’s possible to control this group. Fortunately at the time of the public disclosure our cloud infrastructure had already been updated to address this vulnerability.

While this specific problem was averted, Spectre and Meltdown haven’t reached their full potential yet and will keep on being a threat. We will stay cautious of these hazards and keep on updating our infrastructure with patches released by vendors and will be on the lookout of all communication Spectre and Meltdown related.

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